500 Bucks and a Pack of Smokes

How much is your life worth?

ADDITIONAL PLAYS FOR DOWNLOAD AT THE NEW PLAY EXCHANGE

James also has several full-length, one-act, and ten minute plays available at his page on The New Play Exchange.

A Christmas Carol – Cast of 10
Cast: 10 6M, 4W – 2 Acts – 120 minutes

A cast of ten brings to life this fresh, fun and lively adaptation of A Christmas Carol where you’ll meet Mr. Bentley, learn about the letters Scrooge wrote to his sister Fan, and find out who Mr. Newbury is. You’ll still find all the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future along with Tiny Tim, Bob Cratchit, the Ghost of Jacob Marley, Old Fezziwig, Scrooge’s nephew Fred, and the love of Scrooge’s life, Belle. There are some new scary bits, a few good laughs, a tender moment or two, and some surprises! It’s a fresh take on an old tale sure to thrill young and old alike.

NOTE: The script is similar to my large cast version of A Christmas Carol but the style of production is different. The same script is told with a cast of ten instead of a cast of 25 to 40.

The Short Synopsis: Six characters from Langford tell stories from their lives: stories about, jealousy, revenge, love and forgiveness.

Scene 1 – Back Roads: Mitch just wants to get drunk with his friends, roast marshmallows, and burn every copy of, The Story of Langford: A Century of Progress, the book he was commissioned to write by the Mayor.

Scene 2 – Bad Habits: Simone is busy getting things ready for her parent’s 50th wedding anniversary while she talks about Debbie Fisher and how much the two of them hated each other and how she caught her father cheating at the Green Gables Motel when she was sixteen and how that forever changed the relationship between her and her father.

Scene 3 – Ain’t Nothing Better Than Fried Chicken: Earl is eating fried chicken and potato salad, on a hot summer day, in the park, while remembering, how twenty years ago, all that trouble started and people ended up getting killed.

Scene 4 – Bad Habits: On a hot summer day during the Harvest Festival Carol is packing a picnic basket and talking about wanting to leave Langford when she was growing up and having to come back years later to look after her sick mother.

Scene 5 – Dandelions for Becky: Trent Bowers is painting his fence and talking about the first summer he and his wife Tammy moved into the old neighborhood and how every Sunday morning they’d wake up and find a dandelion bouquet wrapped in a white ribbon on the bottom step of their front porch.

Scene 6 – Twelve Years: Nora is celebrating her twelfth wedding anniversary alone, drinking wine, and talking about how cities and buildings and mountains and trees and animals and people all have souls and that sometimes you can capture that soul in a photograph.

Jessica Quinn is a hard-drinking female detective who has to be twice as tough and twice as smart in order to succeed in a man’s world where women are seen as merely housewives, tramps, and gold diggers. Twenty years ago, Mary McConnell was forced to give up her baby girl for adoption by her father Colonel McConnell. Now a woman by the name of Hannah Stark has shown up claiming to be Mary’s daughter and the Colonel’s granddaughter. Quinn has been hired to find out the truth. Complicating matters is Quinn’s relentless crusade to put Alexander King, a local crime Lord, whom she blames for her father’s death, behind bars. There are plenty of twists and turns and a few gunfights as Quinn tries to find out the truth about Hannah and put King in jail.

After being drugged playwright Morgan Brown and theatre critic Scarlet Osgood wake up tied together back to back on stage at the abandoned Chelsea Theatre. Leo a failed playwright and Scarlet’s ex-husband has brought Scarlet and Morgan there to prove that his most recent play The Phantom of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet is better than anything Morgan has ever written and worthy of Scarlet’s critical praise. Desperate to win back his wife and get his play produced Leo is prepared to kill – or so he says – to get what he wants.

The Perfect Match Corporation provides humans with robotic companions. Sarah Quan has run into her old boyfriend Christopher Connor and invited him and his robotic companion Melissa over to have dinner with her and her glitchy robotic companion Leo. It soon becomes apparent that Sarah and Christopher still have feelings for each other and Leo sensing the attraction is determined to keep Sarah and Christopher apart by any means necessary.

Phallus, the son of Oedipus and Jocasta, the King and Queen of Thebes, wants to marry Clitoris. Unknown to Phallus, Clitoris is actually his sister and Oedipus and Jocasta believe that their son’s love for Clitoris is why the Kingdom was cursed by a pox and now faces a terrible drought and possible starvation. To save the people from the wrath of Zeus, Oedipus must offer the Gods the blood of a thousand chickens and maybe even the life of his own son.

Nigel Davenport is a playwright who has been entering the Short Cuts Playwriting Festival for years. He’s never won, in spite of submitting hundreds of plays. When Nigel gets a call from Artistic Director Todd Sparks, he thinks his luck has finally changed, until he meets with Todd and Todd tells him that they’d like him to stop submitting to the Festival because he’s a terrible playwright. In fact, three members of this year’s reading committee resigned, two were treated for depression and one tried to commit suicide all because of Nigel’s plays. But instead of giving up this only inspires Nigel to try harder and figure out how to write an award winning play that will win the festival.